As part of China’s current consumer electronics stimulus program, PC maker sources have indicated Intel is currently supplying dual-core Pentium E5200 CPUs to rural Chinese markets at a reduced cost when bundled with an Intel chipset.

The E5200 normally sells for $64 in quantities of 1,000. With the subsidy being given to meet the needs of the Chinese stimulus program, Intel is targeting a $40 to $50 price range to those PC makers selling to Chinese markets when bundled with an Intel chipset of undisclosed price.

Intel has reportedly also begun offering its dual-core Celeron CPUs for $43 to $53, depending on model, as part of the stimulus program.

Rick’s Opinion
Dual-core and higher CPUs are where it’s at. There should not be a future CPU that is manufactured without being at least a dual-core, especially in x86 spaces. In addition, there should be full energy saving technology introduced to all future chips which allow each core to be shut down completely when not needed. This would allow the machine to operate in single-core, dual-core, quad-core (or more-core) modes, based on a user setting on the motherboard. You would then also get the ability of particular applications to use less power, generate less heat, etc., when not under a heavy load, extending battery life and just making more green energy sense in general.

Such a configuration would be ideal for notebooks. In addition, not many realize this, the x86 ISA provides a computer instruction recognized by the CPU called HLT, short for “halt”. When this computer instruction, opcode 0xF4, is encountered, the CPU stops processing any future computer instructions until an external interrupt is signaled — which is usually the result of the on-board timer or PCI-like device which needs to be serviced in some way (such as reading a packet of network data that was just transmitted over ethernet).

Heavy use of the HLT instruction can greatly reduce a CPU’s heat generation under normal use. However, most modern day operating systems (like Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) utilize “idle CPU cycles” for some forms of background computing, which means the CPU draws more power even when the active user is not doing something directly useful with the machine, due to the OS’s design and desire to distribute workloads required to keep the machine in top running efficiency to the idle CPU cycles and times. Features like disk optimization and cache prefetching are often executed in these “idle CPU cycles”.